BABUSHKA: The Warrior's Angel

Chapter III. The Only Race Is With Yourself

III. THE ONLY RACE IS WITH YOURSELF  

It was the stench that roused the warrior from his sleep in the middle of the night. But before he could completely emerge from that No Man’s Land between his peace and war, he had to wade through a fog so thick it could have been tinned and sold in fifty-seven varieties.

            His first compos mentis thought was the identification of the horse tranquillizers as the culprits; well, that and the quart of pure-grain cachaça he’d used to wash them down. It then took him a few more moments to tune in to the fact that he’d filled his shorts with a large amount of faecal matter. This was not the first time it had happened though and he was willing to lay down his inheritance it wouldn’t be the last: a firm stool was just yet another pleasure denied to him.

           No, what troubled him far more than the slush down below was the complete hash he’d made of the whole thing with the pup.

            Where had his mind been?

           Over the previous twenty-four hours there had been the extraction then the transporter then the medic then the debriefing then the drop-off then the beer then the week-old pizza then the cachaça then the pills; and during it all, it hadn’t mattered how hard he tried to focus on the question, he just kept drawing a blank.

           Suddenly though, like a flash of some detail from a dream, he remembered where he’d first heard that old poem and how the rest of it went:

                        They have a silence that speaks for them

                        at night and when the clock counts.

                        They say:

                        We were young.

                        We have died.

                        Remember us.

            He had killed the pup in the early hours of the previous day and the previous day had been the ninth. December the ninth. For the first time in a decade he had forgotten the anniversary of his Puziashka’s death.

            All those years and yet here he still was: still alive and kicking; still doing the same shit. While all the time God was still doing His same shit: Still moving in His mind-fuckingly mysterious ways; as if He had nothing better to do with His time than save his sorry ass, over and over again. After all, what was a decade to Him? When we whither and die in a blink of His eye…

            Had that day even registered on His divine Richter scale?

            The day when everything he knew and loved… the day it had all turned to crap.

            Crap of the same stench and form – or lack thereof – as the toxic slime currently contaminating his underwear.

            Had that day even rippled His divine pond?

            The day her life had been torn from him.

            Sucking away his own reason for living.

            As though her flesh had been ripped clean from his own bones.

            As if it was his own soul that had been torn away – hacked like an unborn child from the port of its womb then cast as slop to the whim of the waves. Left to drift, lost and alone. Abandoned like the Mary friggin’ Celeste; the mist of each new dawn about as welcome as a fart in the confession box. Year in, year out, nothing new except the ribbons they kept pinning on his chest and the lines someone kept doodling on his face.